Sustainable Food - Pulses

Sustainable comes from the verb "to Sustain"

To Sustain means to maintain, to support, to uphold or to endure.

Sustainability refers to environmental, social and economic sustainability,

Today I mainly want to talk about environmental sustainability, to me this means

using natural resources so that in the future we can continue to rely on them in a long term. Today's focus resource will be pulses (also called legumes)

.

Pulses

Pulses are some of the most sustainable food resources on our planet

Pulses are the edible seeds of plants in the legume family. Pulses grow in pods and come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors.

What's so environmentally positive when we talk about pulses?

Growing pulses supports an impactful decrease of greenhouse gas emissions on our planet and in addition, pulses absorb nitrogen from the air and use this to grow and to

fertilise the soil they are growing in.

In addition to these positive effects, pulses need a much lower amount of water to grow.

• 1 Kilo of pulses need approximately 2 Liters of water,

• 1 Kilo of Chicken needs around 300 Liters ot water, and

• 1 Kilo of Beef needs 15.000 liters of water.

On top of this, Pulses contribute to biodiversity, pulses improve soil structure, enrich the soil and provide a favourable environment for insects and soil microbes.

And finally, growing pulses requires much less agricultural farmland and soil compared to producing animal proteins.

Pulses have been nourishing people around the planet for thousands of years.

Pulses are full of protein fibres, vitamins and minerals and low on fat.

Especially in the Indian, Asian and Middle Eastern cuisines, pulses play a very important role in the daily food consumption.

An additional positive side effect is also, that the percentage of society diseases

is much lower in those countries than in the western world.

Taking all this into consideration, many national western dietary guidelines recommend pulses as part of a healthy diet. Studies have shown that people who eat at least 100 grams of pulses per day have higher intakes of fibre, protein, calcium, potassium, folate, zinc, iron, and magnesium as well as lower intakes of total and saturated fats.

Many diets around the world rely on pulses as a source of protein. The amount of protein in beans, lentils, chickpeas and peas is 2-3 times the levels found in cereal grains like wheat, rice, quinoa, oats, barley, and corn. 

For example, eating just 100 grams of lentils provides the same amount of protein as 200 grams of quinoa or 250 grams  of rice or corn. 

Compared to animal proteins and many other plant-based sources of proteins,

pulses are much more affordable and a much more sustainable protein source.

“Knowing all these statistically proven advantages of pulses, as being the most sustainable source of healthy proteins, the question occurs, why in our modern world, pulses are still not on top of our daily diets and on our menus.

Many of our western consumers still live by:   “Unknown makes unloved”

Many consumers rather choose food they know, fancy or are familiar with, instead of consuming food that they don't know so well, even if the food is healthier. 

Over the past few decades, food has always been around it's taste and not around sustainability, but knowing what is happening at the moment on our planet, with climate change, and increasing prices of many resources,it is time to rethink, and change our food habits.

In other words, it's time to start using pulses more effective and durable inside our modern diets and menus, and use pulses as a staple inside as many as possible dishes.

How can we convince consumers and and especially also chefs, to choose for more pulses on the plate or in daily menus?

1. By experimenting with pulses how these can be integrated in a more delicious way, instead of just being named plant-based and healthy.

2. By letting the food industry and chefs, create tastes that excite us as consumers that showcase the many, many different examples of innovative delicious and tastful pulses dishes, i’m convinced the consumer reactions will be enthusiastic.

3. By not seeing pulses as just a stand-alone ingredient but as part of a whole dish or menu as starter, main and even dessert

4. By giving pulses and dishes with pulses a better appearance, with more attractive names, that have a higher recognation value in our social media western world.

   For example, "homemade chili sin carne" sounds better than "vegan bean casserole", or something like "white popcorn topping" is more attractive than "roasted white beans".

On the other hand, by creating pulses dishes, that taste, look and sound delicious we can create another even better Win-Win situation, then not only we bring people closer to loving and eating these delicious dishes, these dishes are healthier, they cost less.and they support our Planet

So in our western world it makes absolutely a lot of sense to change traditional, meat-heavy diets towards more pulses heavy, innovative, healthy, Instagrammable and tasty diets.

I’m not saying you have to become vegetarians, or that Vegan is the only way forward, but a sensitive mix of reduced consumption of animal proteins, with an increased use of pulses should be the way forward.

Pulses should be playing a much bigger role, going forward, in our daily personal diets

So lets start working on creating dishes with a sustainable switch, were pulses play a bigger role, in combination with reductions of animal proteins, then by doing this we can support our world going forward to a more sustainable food system.

The Planet will thank us for it.

for more information please also check out; Beans is How; SDG2 Advocacy Hub

PFJ / 02.25